For the past few months, as we've been talking to large enterprises about Stackato and their private PaaS plans, some interesting IT strategies have emerged around the role of languages like Python, Ruby, and PHP play in the mix with Java.

With the recent official release of the Python agent for New Relic (our
application monitoring partner) we're featuring this guest post by Graham Dumpleton. I had the pleasure of working with Graham as we tested the Python agent and the New Relic service with Stackato in recent weeks. --TT

You asked for it, you got it: our new Stackato Sandbox service makes it easier for you to test deployment to the cloud (and more).

The Stackato Sandbox service allows you to test deployment of apps to a privately hosted environment on Amazon EC2, complete with hosting, security, and scaling of applications. And you could win big* for trying the Stackato Sandbox!

We are excited about our partnership with New Relic which enables us to bundle New Relic Standard Edition free of charge for all Stackato users. So you now have access to the application level performance management tools to monitor end-user experiences and performance in real-time, proactively diagnose performance bottlenecks at the code level, and ensure the successful deployment of applications.

We are both excited and honored to announce that our newest offering, Stackato, has been a catalyst in ActiveState being selected as Cloud Foundry's Community Lead for Python! The Community Lead Program extends Cloud Foundry's language support with trusted ecosystem partners like ActiveState.